


i love you like the ashes in my cigarette box

by procrastinatingbookworm



Category: Hollow Knight (Video Games)
Genre: 30 Minute Fic, Borderline Personality Disorder, Disabled Character, Flash Fic, Gen, Intrusive Thoughts, Self-Esteem Issues, Self-Harm, Stream of Consciousness, internalized ableism/sanism, this is before brumm joins the troupe if anyone's wondering, vent fic i guess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:01:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28444350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/procrastinatingbookworm/pseuds/procrastinatingbookworm
Summary: An unevenness of identity, the whispers of what-could-have-been, if-only-you-had.
Relationships: Divine & Grimm (Hollow Knight), Grimm & The Nightmare's Heart (Hollow Knight)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 19





	i love you like the ashes in my cigarette box

**Author's Note:**

> written in thirty minutes and edited afterward.

There’s something rotten in Grimm’s chest.

He can feel it in his breast, tangled up with his trachea. It’s not quite where the hollow of his heart is, but near. Near enough that they bleed together into one failure of selfhood—one gaping, tattered uncertainty. An unevenness of identity, the whispers of what-could-have-been, if-only-you-had.

There is an emptiness, and there is a rottenness, and between the two of them, they take up the whole of Grimm’s chest. They didn’t always, but they’ve grown. Grimm doesn’t know which came first, which grew from the other. Perhaps they have been for as long as he has. Perhaps they are the only true thing.

One feeds the other. They both feed the Heart. There is nothing in Grimm that does not feed the Heart.

(He fears that he is not enough fuel by his lonesome—that his avarice is only a gathering of kindling. He doesn’t know what exactly makes that wrong, but he fears it all the same. It feels less like rottenness and more like ice.)

He is cold, often. For all the heat the Nightmare Heart lends to its vessels, for all the warmth that he surrounds himself with, the night crawls through the tent fabric and curls its hands around his, until he’s sure his carapace will crack.

Grimm surrounds himself with bugs mortal enough to require sustenance and sleep. This was an oversight on his part; for all his own mortality, for all that he is a god of the sleeping, sleep only comes to him with ease when his body begins to wear thin around the Heart.

In the night, alone but for the chittering Grimmkin, Grimm stands with his hands thrust into the white-hot heart of a torch, and waits until layers of shell begin to peel and crumble before he retrieves them.

Divine buys him a pair of gloves at a market in one of the Kingdoms the Troupe passes through. She says nothing when she hands them to him.

The gloves are woven silk, shining and black, and secured with a velvet ribbon at his wrist.

He wears them. They do not keep his hands warm, but they hide the scars of burning, and they feed the rotten shame, which feeds the Heart.

Grimm does not chase sleep. When he sleeps, the Heart is within speaking reach, and Grimm will always be tempted to ask him  _ Is this really love that I feel? Or are my chosen only logs on my funeral pyre? Do I think of them when I take them into myself, or only of how they can ease the path for me? _

Young bugs pluck the petals from flowers— _ loves me, loves me not, loves me, loves me not. _ Grimm knows he is loved. He is adored—he can be sure of that, as much as it would be easier otherwise. It is  _ his _ love that he doubts. There is only rot and gaping where there should be a heart.

_ Loving, loveless, loving, loveless. _

Grimm never finishes a flower. He doesn’t want to know. Half-plucked, he drops them, lets them rot.


End file.
